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Staff at​ JD Wetherspoon, TGI Fridays and McDonald’s are staging coordinated strikes next month to highlight the issue of “poverty pay” and insecure working in the UK hospitality industry. Workers in two Wetherspoon’s pubs will walk out on 4 October alongside staff from four McDonald’s chains and three TGI Fridays restaurants. Matt Rouse, a striking kitchen worker at the Bright Helm pub in Brighton said he had been inspired by his co-workers to “call out injustice in our workplaces”.

When employers don’t pay their workers a living wage, taxpayers are forced to pick up the tab in the form of government assistance. Some states are considering telling the poor-paying companies to pick up the tab instead.

High rents are a national, not just an urban problem. Real estate company Zillow noted this year that in 2015, rents increased nationally by more than 3 percent. Meanwhile, personal incomes are creeping along; in May of 2015, disposable personal income grew just .5 percent. The average national rent, according to ApartmentGuide, is close to $800, while working full-time for the federal minimum wage nets you just under $1,000.

Matt Yglesias is an insightful writer, but his recent article, “Hillary Clinton’s favorite chart is pretty misleading” is itself very misleading. Since the Clinton campaign’s “favorite chart” is an EPI chart, which Jared Bernstein and I originally came up with twenty years ago, I think it’s important to set the record straight. The main problem is that Yglesias does not actually engage with the chart he says he’s criticizing.

I’m a single mother and I struggle to support my son on the $10.33 an hour I make at one of the most exclusive clubs in America – the US Senate. I’m a cashier employed by the British-owned contractor that runs the cafeterias in the Senate office buildings. But even though I serve some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, I can’t afford to buy my son school supplies or clothes.

I set out to replicate the Sawhill/Haskins figures, which was met with mixed success. I did manage to basically replicate the initial screen they put on the 2007 data, which involves excluding all families headed by people below the age of 25, above the age of 64, and who receive disability income. No matter how much I tried, I could never get the figures to line up exactly, but I got close enough:

Polls continue to show that Americans care more about the economy than any other election issue. Fox News moderators noted that they had received more than 3,000 economy-themed questions on Facebook before the debate. Which is why it's so baffling that neither the questioners nor most candidates seemed eager to talk about growth, jobs and - as Republicans have been promising to do all election cycle - America's beleaguered working class.

Despite their supposed diversity, GOP candidates share a dependence on two broad-spectrum lies: First, that they’re better at producing overall growth — for example: Trump boasting, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” or Bush promising “4 percent growth as far as the eye can see” — and, second, that growth by itself will benefit everyone.

Why does Galt only intend to charge Dagny a “very small” fee? According to the law which he made up on the spot, he could charge her any price he chooses. Why not say that the penalty for trespassing is a fine the size of her entire bank account, or that room and board in his house costs a thousand dollars a day?
This is John Galt we’re talking about, after all. The first time we saw him, the text said that he had “a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it”.

In a 3-2 decision involving Browning-Ferris Industries of California, the National Labor Relations Board refined its standard for determining joint-employer status. The revised standard is designed “to better effectuate the purposes of the Act in the current economic landscape.” With more than 2.87 million of the nation’s workers employed through temporary agencies in August 2014, the Board held that its previous joint employer standard has failed to keep pace with changes in the workplace...

The income level necessary for families to secure an adequate but modest living standard is an important economic yardstick. While poverty thresholds help to evaluate what it takes for families to live free of serious economic deprivation, EPI's Family Budget Calculator offers a broader measure of economic welfare.

Thursday’s release of state income data from the American Community Survey (ACS) showed that the gradual improvement in state economies from 2013 to 2014 brought little change in overall economic conditions for households in most states. The ACS data showed a slight increase in median household income for the United States overall and similar modest increases in household incomes in a majority of states—although only a handful of these increases were statistically significant.

You often hear inequality has widened because globalization and technological change have made most people less competitive, while making the best educated more competitive.
There’s some truth to this. The tasks most people used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.

EVERY so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam...

Strong U.S. job growth still isn’t having the effect that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has long been waiting for: better raises for workers. Until that happens, there's little reason for the Fed to start worrying about inflation -- or pulling back too much on its efforts to support the economic recovery.

Minimum-wage jobs are meant to be the first rung on a career ladder, a chance for entry-level workers to prove themselves before earning a promotion or moving on to other, better-paying jobs. But a growing number of Americans are getting stuck on that first rung for years, if they ever move up at all.

While the availability of pension plans for most Americans has dwindled in the last 30 years, more than half of Fortune 500 CEOs receive company-sponsored pension plans. Their firms are allowed to deduct the cost of these plans from their taxes, even if they have cut worker pensions or never offered them at all.

We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false. An analysis of the facts should make that clear.1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700).

It is impossible to be good with money when you don’t have any. Full stop. If I’m saving my spare five bucks a week, in the best-case scenario I will have saved $260 a year. For those of you that think in quarters: $65 per quarter in savings. If you deny yourself even small luxuries, that’s the fortune you’ll amass. Of course you will never manage to actually save it; you’ll get sick at least one day and miss work and dip into it for rent. Gas will spike and you’ll need it to get to work.